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34 Herald Sun, Saturday, July 17, 2010 heraldsun.com.au

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EDITORIAL
Herald Sun
Leaders must
show the way
PRIME Minister Julia Gillard and Oppo-
sition Leader Tony Abbott must pledge
themselves this election to present poli-
cies, not platitudes, give facts, not spin.
They will be talking to an electorate that
remains largely unconvinced about their
credentials and will be in no mood for
time wasting.
FIRST

These are two leaders who reached their

positions by default: Mr Abbott by a single
vote in a bitterly divided party room and
Ms Gillard after a coup mounted by the
34

ALP’s factional bosses.

Sadly, thus far there has been little but
DHS 17-JUL-2010 PAGE

rhetoric and point-scoring.

Labor promises financial responsibility
and stands on its record of surviving the
global financial crisis with Australia’s
economy in better shape than most.
For its part, the Coalition says Labor has
grossly overspent and only a change
of government can give the nation econ-
omic stability.
Who to believe?
There is already a sense in the electorate

Gillard in search
that we are being rushed to judgment.
The term an Australian government has
in office before it must again go to the polls
is too short. It could have been four years,
but a referendum failed when the major
parties could not agree the last time the
question was
C M Y K

put to voters.
The same
need for a bi-
partisanship
approach to
some of the
most signifi-
cant issues
of poll position
HERE is no tidy way to knife a administration, and then dash to the

T
F B 1 2 3

facing Aus-
ELECTION
tralia are pres-
ent in this
election.
But they
2010
have found the same failure to co-operate
by Labor and the Coalition.
The most divisive issue is what to do
about asylum seekers and illegal boat
arrivals. While the Government and the
Opposition disagree, they appear closer
than they might think.
The Prime Minister’s solution of a re-
gional processing centre for refugees
seems little different from the Howard
government’s Pacific solution.
But still they argue. The Coalition says it
will take ‘‘direct action’’ on climate change
by asking industry to reduce its carbon,
while the Gillard Government says it will
pursue a carbon tax, but has not put
forward any detail.
What was designed by Labor as a
takeover of national hospital funding failed
to achieve anything near that.
Like the minerals resource rent tax, it
remains a compromise or a cave-in.
Julia Gillard, as education minister, de-
livered on a national curriculum and as
Prime Minister has tossed in a subsidy on
school uniforms as an election sweetener.
But where are the policies on national
infrastructure, water and energy.
The electorate is tired of the political war
of words. Meanwhile, the war in
Afghanistan drags on.
As still more Diggers die and are
wounded, neither party appears ready to
set a timetable for withdrawal.
We pride ourselves on being a stable
country with a growing economy and an
exciting future.
Labor and the Coalition must tell us how
they intend to secure that future.
THIS YEAR LAST YEAR
serving prime minister. You
can’t do it without getting blood
on your hands. Julia Gillard is no
exception.
It is hardly surprising that she does
not want to talk about what happened
that night, just over three weeks ago,
when she confronted Kevin Rudd in
his office.
The details of any assassination
are ugly. Better to shroud them in
secrecy and move forward, as Gillard
likes to say.
That is why my question at the
National Press Club about the
leadership deal that Rudd thought
she accepted and then reneged on
was inconvenient.
Gillard wanted people to forget about
how she came to be Prime Minister
and focus on what she proposed to do in
the role.
Instead, she will go into an election
campaign with the bitterness and
duplicity she thought had been covered
up now on open display. And that is
bad news for the Government and its
re-election prospects.
It gives Tony Abbott and the
Coalition a message of disunity to use
against the Government in what is
shaping as a very tight contest.
More than that, even though Rudd’s
popularity dwindled in his final
months in office, there is significant
voter concern about the way he was
brought down.
The Liberals believe they can tap into
this and use it against Labor, especially
in Rudd’s home state of Queensland.
The sensitivity being shown by Labor
strategists suggests they share the view
that the issue is a danger zone for the
new Prime Minister.
The talk that surfaced yesterday,
suggesting Rudd may be dudded on his
wish to hold a senior Cabinet position in
a re-elected Gillard Government, will
not help either.
Gillard’s own statements do not
indicate she has any plans to break her
promise to the man whose job she took.
‘‘I have said that Kevin Rudd will serve
LAURIE
OAKES
And there are persistent mutterings at
senior levels of the Labor Party that to
have an embittered former PM in
Cabinet would be folly.
Now that key Labor power-brokers
have convinced themselves that Rudd
is to blame for details of his June 23
meeting with Gillard being leaked to me
— even though at least three other
people were briefed on the proposed
deal — the arguments against giving
him a place at the Cabinet table are
becoming more strident.
‘‘She’d be raving mad to have him
anywhere near Cabinet,’’ a senior party
figure said yesterday. ‘‘It won’t happen.’’
If Gillard comes around to this view
after the election — assuming she wins
— it will be a simple matter for her to
offer Rudd the kind of ministry he
cannot possibly accept.
Rudd can hardly be blamed if he feels
angry at the moment. To justify the
leadership change, Gillard and her
senior ministers have trashed much of
the former PM’s legacy.
They have also used him as a
convenient scapegoat for everything
that went wrong, as though none of
‘Julia Gillard will go into an
election campaign with the
bitterness and duplicity she
thought had been covered up
now on open display’
them were part of the Government
when he was in charge.
Politics is a grubby, thankless
business. God knows why Rudd wants
to stick around.
Gillard’s National Press Club
appearance was intended to be her
election launchpad.
polls this weekend.
I threw a spanner into the works with
the revelation of Rudd’s offer at their
meeting to stand aside voluntarily
closer to the election if opinion polls
continued to show the Government
facing defeat.
Gillard, I understand, described the
proposal as sensible and responsible.
She may have seen this as simply a
stage in trying to persuade him to step
down that night, but there is no doubt
Rudd took it as agreement.
This gives Abbott another attack line
for the campaign: if Rudd could not
trust Gillard, why should voters?
That will at least help Abbott counter
the problem of his admission on The 7.30
Report that he does not always tell the
truth himself.
Whether Gillard initially agreed to the
deal or not, though, the opinion of most
political operators would be that she
was smart to reject it in the end.
LEADER in so much trouble that
A he is thinking of throwing in the
towel within weeks is probably
finished anyway.
And if Rudd was the main impediment
to the Government winning a second
term, letting him stay on a while longer
out of sympathy would have been plain
stupid with an election imminent.
Now Gillard will be hoping that firing
the election starting gun will achieve
what the Press Club appearance did
not, by concentrating the minds of
voters on the future.
That does not mean the Government
is across the line. In fact, some shrewd
judges in the party think it will still
fall short.
Labor goes into the election with
disappointing opinion poll ratings,
largely because of the new PM’s inept
handling of the proposal for an East
Timor asylum-seeker processing centre.
But Gillard should give the party a
better chance than Rudd, who had lost
his way in recent months — as long as

173 162
as a senior minister in a re-elected Gillard
Government,’’ she said yesterday. ‘‘I will
honour that commitment.’’
+ But she will not nominate Foreign
Victorian deaths in 2010, compared with the same day last year. Affairs, the post Rudd clearly wants.
The idea was that she would present
herself as cautious and responsible, lay
out her economic management
credentials, reassure voters that she
would run a fiscally conservative
she is not too weighed down with
baggage from her leadership coup.
Laurie Oakes is political editor for the Nine Network.
His column appears every Saturday in the Herald Sun +

30 Herald Sun, Saturday, July 24, 2010
+
EDITORIAL
Herald Sun
When trust
is not enough
AFTER the first week of political cam-
paigning, it is obvious that Prime Minister
Julia Gillard’s words before she called the
election are holding true.
Unfortunately, it is a truth that belies her
message.
‘‘I will ask for the Australian people’s
trust to move Australia forward,’’ were the
FIRST
words of the new Prime Minister.
After her failure yesterday to announce
real policy on climate change, it appears
that relying on people’s ‘‘trust’’ to get
30
Labor re-elected is the main plank in Mr
Gillard’s election platform.
DHS 24-JUL-2010 PAGE
As each day of the campaign passes, it
becomes obvious that Labor intends to
neutralise any-
thing contro-
versial. Trust
me, says Ms
Gillard, then
avoids the de-
tail. For in-
stance, her
plan on climate
change is to ap-
point a ‘‘citi-
zens’
sembly’’ to
as-
bring about a
ELECTION
2010
national consensus, and a ‘‘climate change
C M Y K
commission’’ to supposedly inform the citi-
zens expected to reach such a consensus.
The citizens’ assembly sounds like some-
thing borrowed from the French revolution
but without the use of the guillotine,
unless the Labor Party uses the parliamen-
tary device of the same name to kill off
debate after winning the election.
Not that Opposition Leader Tony
F B 1 2 3
Abbott has laid down anything more than
what he calls ‘‘direct action’’ in encourag-
ing industry to regulate its own emissions
and a promise of a ‘‘green army’’ to combat
environmental issues.
Ms Gillard should stand for more than
just a commitment to win this election.
The same can be said of Mr Abbott. He,
too, has avoided any backlash to the
Coalition’s belief in labour market deregu-
lation by simply avoiding the issue. He must
think that if he were to discuss it, he might
risk losing more marginal seats to Labor.
The election campaign is being trivialised
by both parties. Neither appears prepared
to put its real position before the people.
The biggest risk, wrote Herald Sun national
political editor Phillip Hudson, was taken
by Ms Gillard when she kissed a baby. The
baby, he said, might have screamed.
Out of bounds
FOOTY fans have been benched by the
AFL in its negotiations over television
rights from 2012.
Matches will start later on Saturdays,
leading into the network nightly news. It
will be good for TV ratings, but not for fans
at the ground who will see matches begin in
mid-afternoon and finish in the dark.
As reported in today’s Herald Sun, it will
be ball up at 3pm. The traditional 2.10pm
start will be no more.
Monday night matches will be a problem
for families. A late night on Monday is a
poor start for children getting up to go to
school on Tuesday.
Television has made watching football
more accessible to thousands of fans, but
the AFL needs to remember that looking
after its supporters is just as important as
looking after the TV networks.
THIS YEAR LAST YEAR
179 168
+ first term of a Coalition government, the
Victorian deaths in 2010, compared with the same day last year.
Gillard ushers in
the era of farce
O Julia Gillard’s answer to
S
climate change is to set up the
biggest focus group in history.
The political consultants
scripting Labor’s election
campaign must be wetting themselves
with delight.
Nothing could illustrate more
emphatically the hollowness of modern
Australian politics. The Liberals are not
much better.
Tony Abbott’s cowardice and
complete lack of conviction on
industrial relations policy deserves
nothing but contempt.
The sad truth is we have a couple of
political pygmies heading the two major
parties in this election.
Both have small ambitions for the
country. Both are afraid to lead.
Both think they can con their way into
The Lodge.
Gillard’s proposal for a 150-member
citizens’ assembly to try to reach
consensus on climate change and the
case for a carbon price is the wackiest
idea to come along in quite a while.
Kevin Rudd’s farcical 2020 Summit
looks sensible by comparison.
The very reason we are going to the
polls on August 21 is to elect a
150-member citizens’ assembly. It is
called the House of Representatives.
What Gillard proposes is to instead
outsource what should be the job of
Parliament to a group of unelected
people, chosen — on the basis of the
electoral roll and census data — by ‘‘an
independent authority’’.
HE is saying, in effect, that
S Parliament as an institution no
longer works.
Also, by promising that her citizens’
assembly would be ‘‘genuinely
representative of the wider Australian
public’’, she implies that the Parliament
is not.
She may well be right on both counts,
but surely the answer is to reform
Parliament — not set up other ad hoc
bodies to take over its role.
Here’s a thought. Maybe we could get
Gillard’s mysterious ‘‘independent
authority’’ to pick our MPs and save
ourselves the trouble of having
elections at all.
It is an absurd approach, and the
Prime Minister must know it. She takes
us for fools.
As does Abbott with his out-of-the-
blue commitment not to touch, in the
industrial relations legislation Labor
LAURIE
OAKES
has put in place. Since he replaced
Malcolm Turnbull as Liberal leader,
Abbott has been attacking Labor’s
workplace laws, claiming they would
destroy small business.
As recently as mid-May, in his
Budget reply speech in Parliament, he
was promising ‘‘to take the unfair
dismissal monkey off the back of
small businesses’’.
Suddenly, after a shadow cabinet
meeting on the eve of the election being
called, he announces that these same
laws should be given ‘‘a fair go’’.
Business, he says, including small
business, ‘‘deserves certainty’’.
When he changed position on an
emissions trading system, Abbott
admitted to Malcolm Turnbull that he
was a weather vane.
‘The sad truth is we have
a couple of political
pygmies heading the
two major parties ’
Spooked by an imminent election
and the ghost of WorkChoices, he has
proved it again.
But the harder Abbott pushed his line
during the week, the less credibility it
had. How can any government seriously
promise no legislative change under
any circumstances in such a crucial
area as IR?
Abbott really stretched credulity
when he started extending his promise
beyond one parliamentary term.
Here is an example:
ABBOTT: The legislation will not
change.
JOURNALIST: But the regulations
might?
ABBOTT: Not today, not tomorrow,
not next year, not in three years’ time,
not in 10 years’ time.
The result is that, in an important area
of Federal Government responsibility,
the alternative prime minister has no
policy except to swear over and over
again that he won’t do anything, ever. It
is a ridiculous position. Small wonder
nobody believes it.
+
heraldsun.com.au
Rudd’s critics used to claim he was a
politician driven by spin, but he was a
leader of substance compared with his
successor, if her behaviour so far in the
campaign is any guide.
Before the climate change
announcement we had Gillard’s
populist promises on population and
her repeated statements that we should
‘‘take a breath’’ and not hurtle towards
‘‘a big Australia’’.
It turned out to be nothing but waffle.
It was not about immigration, she said;
nor was it about the birth rate. Can
anyone think of anything else that
contributes to population growth?
HE reason the Prime Minister came
T out with this tripe is that the spin
doctors have told her that, in the
public mind, population is linked with
the dreaded issue of asylum seekers
arriving by boat.
Talk about population and the
punters will think you’re talking about
the boats.
When Gillard was asked on radio to
say specifically what her population
policy is, she replied: ‘‘We’re going to be
guided in this with expert panels
working with us.’’
More advisory panels. Shades of the
climate change cop-out. Another non-
policy. Another fudge.
In her speech yesterday, Gillard had
the temerity to compare her approach
on climate change with the
introduction of Medicare. In fact, the
contrast could hardly be greater.
There was no phony citizens’
assembly set up as an excuse for delay
and inaction then.
Gough Whitlam and health minister
Bill Hayden showed determination and
guts in devising a national health
insurance scheme and fighting for it
until they got it through the Parliament.
It was dismantled by the Fraser
government, but then Bob Hawke and
his health minister, Neal Blewett,
fought the battle again and put
Medicare in place against strong
opposition from the Coalition.
Agree with them or not, we had real
leaders in politics in those days. Not
just pygmies.
Laurie Oakes is political editor for the Nine Network.
His column appears every Saturday in the Herald Sun +
heraldsun.com.au
Herald Sun
Jail but not
firing squad
SCOTT Rush, the young Australian on
death row as one of the Bali Nine drug
smugglers, may find that the man his
father says could have stopped him may
still prove to be his saviour.
Retired Australian Federal Police com-
missioner Mick Keelty was blamed by
Rush’s father for the arrest of his son in
Indonesia five years ago.
Lee Rush told police in Queensland his
son was going to smuggle drugs into
Indonesia in the hope they would warn him
not to try.
But the Australian Federal Police passed
on the infor-
mation to
Indonesian
police who
stopped the
then 19-year-
old Rush (pic-
tured here)
when he
stepped off the
plane with sev-
eral kilograms
of heroin
strapped to his
body. But as re-
ported
today’s Herald
in
Sun, a letter
written by for-
mer AFP com-
missioner Mick Keelty in Rush’s defence
may help in a final appeal to the
Indonesian courts this month.
The letter says Rush was acting as a drug
courier, but there was no evidence to
suggest he was one of the organisers, or
that he had been involved in drug smug-
gling before the Bali trip.
The AFP has since been told by Aus-
tralia’s Home Affairs Minister to consider
the impact of passing on such information
to countries that apply the death penalty.
If Scott Rush and the other Bali Nine
drug smugglers had been arrested before
they left Australia this would have meant
they were tried in Australian courts.
The Herald Sun, while condemning drug
trafficking in the strongest possible terms,
does not condone the death penalty and
has maintained this position when other
Australians have faced execution overseas.
The best outcome for Scott Rush and the
other Bali Nine drug smugglers sentenced
to death is that they are sent back to
Australia to serve out long jail terms.
They deserve to be jailed, but they do not
deserve to die.
Surgery warning
LIPOSUCTION carries a risk and 26-year-
old Lauren James died because of it.
Like any invasive surgical procedure, it is
not as simple as buying new clothes to fit
your new body.
A coroner found yesterday that Ms
James went back to a Melbourne clinic
three days after having liposuction.
But doctors failed to recognise that the
pain she was suffering was caused by life-
threatening complications.
Australians are travelling to other
countries in increasing numbers to take
advantage of cut-price surgery combined
with a holiday.
However, they should recognise that
what seems the most simple operation
carries some small risk wherever it is
performed.
THIS YEAR LAST YEAR
196 175
Victorian deaths in 2010, compared with the same day last year.
Rudd hands PM
a crucial lifeline
N extraordinary aspect of this
A election is that we had to wait
until the campaign mid-point
for one of the participants to
look prime ministerial.
And when it happened it was neither
of the party leaders. Julia Gillard and
Tony Abbott are still battling to project
the strength and authority we expect of
a prime minister.
It was Kevin Rudd, emerging from
gall bladder surgery, who showed them
how. His media appearance announcing
that he would answer Labor’s call for
help and campaign for the woman who
knifed him was masterly.
It raised an obvious question. Why
was Rudd incapable of performing like
this in the last six months of his prime
ministership? Only in his health policy
debate with Tony Abbott did he look
like the Kevin ’07 voters believed they
were electing last time around.
For the rest of the period between
Abbott’s takeover of the Liberal
leadership and Gillard mounting her
coup, Rudd was pretty hopeless.
To a considerable extent, he brought
his fate on himself. Labor would never
have dumped the Rudd we saw in
action on Thursday. But that Rudd had
been AWOL for too long.
Caucus had concluded that the
real Rudd was the indecisive,
gobbledegook-spouting figure the
electorate was starting to treat with
derision. So it is ironic that the other
Rudd should return to the fray in the
very week that his successor also
admitted to dual identities.
HE tightly scripted, insipid, almost
T lifeless Gillard who blew the first
fortnight of the campaign was
not, she would have us believe, the
‘‘real Julia’’.
The ‘‘real Julia’’, apparently, is the
feistier, smarter, braver version that
Labor MPs thought they were getting
when they dumped Rudd.
So now we have the real Kevin and
real Julia campaigning together and
Labor morale, for the moment, has been
lifted. But it is, when you think about it,
a quite ridiculous situation.
Gillard knifes Rudd because she says
the Government has lost its way. She
and other ministers then use the ousted
PM as a scapegoat for every mistake,
eschewing all responsibility themselves.
There is much joyful dancing on
Rudd’s political grave.
But the ghost of the assassinated
leader haunts the election campaign,
LAURIE
OAKES
and voters in his home state resent the
way he has been done in. Gillard’s
campaign falters. So she swallows her
pride and sends out an SOS asking the
bloke whose job she took to come to her
rescue. It is political pulp fiction.
Gillard had little hope of saving the
election without Rudd, but managing
the situation from now on is clearly
fraught with peril.
If Rudd overshadows Gillard on the
campaign trail and the election
continues to be about him, Labor will be
no better off. In the immediate sense,
though, the former PM’s dramatic
intervention was a plus.
Gillard badly needed a circuit-
breaker that would allow attention to
be focused on the Coalition and what an
Abbott prime ministership might mean.
‘Labor would never have
dumped the Rudd we saw in
action on Thursday. But that
Rudd was AWOL for too long’
Rudd’s attack on the Liberal leader was
savage and effective. The question now
is whether Gillard can build on that.
Rudd was right when he warned that
Abbott looked like sliding into office
without scrutiny while all eyes were on
Labor’s soap opera.
Yet, if there are questions about the
real Gillard and the real Rudd, the real
Abbott is an even bigger mystery.
A fascinating piece of audio went up
on the web recently — a radio interview
given by Abbott in 1979 when he was
president of the Sydney University
Students’ Representative Council.
The young Abbott calls for cuts in
education funding, on the grounds that
this would force universities to crack
down on what he calls ‘‘trivial’’ and
‘‘ideological’’ courses, especially in the
arts and economics faculties.
Abbott the student politician also says
he would like to see overall numbers at
university reduced.
And he tells the interviewer: ‘‘While I
think men and women are equal, they
are also different and I think it’s
Herald Sun, Saturday, August 7, 2010 33
+
EDITORIAL
F B 1 2 3
inevitable and I don’t think it’s a bad
thing at all that we always have, say,
C M Y K
more women doing things like
physiotherapy and an enormous number
of women simply doing housework.’’
Abbott would argue that his views
have changed over time. He told me just
last week: ‘‘That’s what people do when
they are mature. They are capable of
growing and changing in response to
changing circumstances.’’
And he is right, of course. But, as the
DHS 7-AUG-2010 PAGE
poet says, the child is father of the man.
It is not very hard to recognise the
makings of today’s would-be prime
minister in that 21-year-old version.
A propensity for mind-changing,
though, is the characteristic that stands
out most in the modern Abbott. He has
become the ultimate political
pragmatist, capable of dumping any
belief or policy that might be electorally
inconvenient.
AKE climate change. Abbott wrote
T a newspaper article urging the
Coalition to vote for an emissions
trading scheme, then told rural Liberals
climate change science was ‘‘crap’’,
33
explained that away by claiming he’d
been trying to persuade them an ETS
compromise was the way to go, and
finally seized the Liberal leadership to
kill off just such a compromise FIRST
negotiated by Malcolm Turnbull.
Abbott promised no tax increases and
no new taxes, then within a month
announced he would impose a new tax
levy on big business to finance a
generous paid parental leave scheme —
the same scheme he had earlier said
would happen over his dead body.
On immigration, Abbott announced
at the start of the campaign that a
Coalition government would halve the
annual intake.
But in May 2008, he’d boasted: ‘‘One of
the Howard government’s greatest but
least recognised achievements was to
rehabilitate the immigration program,
increasing numbers to record levels.’’
And just last January he said: ‘‘There’s
no reason to think that Australia has a
fixed carrying capacity. My instinct is to
extend to as many people as possible the
freedom and benefits of life in Australia.’’
Politicians, like us, are allowed to
change their minds. Abbott, however, is
a serial mind-changer. Or, more likely, he
has adopted Graham Richardson’s
motto — ‘‘Whatever it takes’’.
Laurie Oakes is political editor for the Nine Network.
His column appears every Saturday in the Herald Sun +